Round 1: Tournament of LEPers

It's funny how things work in the blogosphere. Liquid Egg Product made a short little post about playing on FICS and asked how know when other chess bloggers are on. One comment led to another, and a tournament was born. Thus a 10 player round robin between various bloggers has started this week. Here is the participant list in rating order:

kevingafni (drunknknite) 1898
NoTB (Tacticus Maximus) 1834
ppwchess (Polly) 1700
RockyRook (Rocky Rook) 1682
LiquidEggProduct (Donnie) 1678
RLP (Wahrheit) 1671
TheDarkKnightTwo (l3rucewayne) 1593
Rhuiden (Tom) 1530
gorckat (gorckat) 1465
mandalorian (chessloser) 1337

We are playing G/15 with a 30 second increment. This is my first time playing something slower then G/10 with no increment online. I usually am too distracted at the computer to play anything slower then blitz. Though for me the problem with blitz is, I suck! I hang stuff when I play fast, and I lose on time when I play too slow. When I play online it's even worse because spacially I have trouble with the one dimensional board. I've been playing blitz on FICS for about a month now. I keep doing stupid things like leaving my queen en prise, or overlooking mate threats. My FICS blitz rating is in the low 1300s. It's almost as bad as my CTS rating. I may have to include one of my FICS gems in an upcoming Wacky Wednesday post. Considering how this round went maybe I should have saved this for tomorrow.

Round one I'm black against Tom. He went on a sac rampage that didn't quite work.




On move 30 I did one of my typical online blunders. I attacked his queen with an unprotected rook. Fortunately for me, he didn't notice and simply moved the queen away. Phew! I thought that he was going to salvage a draw since he got in a whole series of annoying queen checks. It took me 12 moves to stop the checks and get the queens off the board. On move 65 I missed Qg4 mate. Instead I went pawn grabbing with Qxe3+. I guess that was as good as mate since he resigned.

Hopefully as the weeks go by I'll get used to playing slow online. Maybe I'll actually manage not to hang stuff. Stay tuned for upcoming rounds. Good luck everyone!!